Professional Cloud Architect on Google Cloud Platform

Company overview

EHR Healthcare is a leading provider of electronic health record software to the medical industry. EHR Healthcare provides their software as a service to multi-national medical offices, hospitals, and insurance providers.

Solution concept

Due to rapid changes in the healthcare and insurance industry, EHR Healthcare's business has been growing exponentially year over year. They need to be able to scale their environment, adapt their disaster recovery plan, and roll out new continuous deployment capabilities to update their software at a fast pace.
Google Cloud has been chosen to replace their current colocation facilities.

Existing technical environment

EHR's software is currently hosted in multiple colocation facilities. The lease on one of the data centers is about to expire.

Customer-facing applications are web-based, and many have recently been containerized to run on a group of Kubernetes clusters. Data is stored in a mixture of relational and NoSQL databases (MySQL, MS SQL Server, Redis, and MongoDB).

EHR is hosting several legacy file-and API-based integrations with insurance providers on-premises.
These systems are scheduled to be replaced over the next several years. There is no plan to upgrade or move these systems at the current time.

Users are managed via Microsoft Active Directory. Monitoring is currently being done via various open source tools. Alerts are sent via email and are often ignored.

Business requirements

1. On-board new insurance providers as quickly as possible.
2. Provide a minimum 99.9% availability for all customer-facing systems.
3. Provide centralized visibility and proactive action on system performance and usage.
4. Increase ability to provide insights into healthcare trends.
5. Reduce latency to all customers.
6. Maintain regulatory compliance.
7. Decrease infrastructure administration costs.
8. Make predictions and generate reports on industry trends based on provider data.

Technical requirements

1. Maintain legacy interfaces to insurance providers with connectivity to both on-premises systems and cloud providers.
2. Provide a consistent way to manage customer-facing applications that are container-based.
3. Provide a secure and high-performance connection between on-premises systems and Google Cloud.
4. Provide consistent logging, log retention, monitoring, and alerting capabilities.
5. Maintain and manage multiple container-based environments.
6. Dynamically scale and provision new environments.
7. Create interfaces to ingest and process data from new providers.

Executive statement

Our on-premises strategy has worked for years but has required a major investment of time and money in training our team on distinctly different systems, managing similar but separate environments, and responding to outages. Many of these outages have been a result of misconfigured systems, inadequate capacity to manage spikes in traffic, and inconsistent monitoring practices. We want to use Google Cloud to leverage a scalable, resilient platform that can span multiple environments seamlessly and provide a

consistent and stable user experience that positions us for future growth.

Company Overview

TerramEarth manufactures heavy equipment for the mining and agricultural industries: about 80% of their business is from mining and 20% from agriculture. They currently have over 500 dealers and service centers in 100 countries. Their mission is to build products that make their customers more productive.

Company background

TerramEarth was formed in 1946, when several small, family owned companies combined to retool after World War II. The company cares about their employees and customers and considers them to be extended members of their family.

TerramEarth is proud of their ability to innovate on their core products and find new markets as their customers' needs change. For the past 20 years, trends in the industry have been largely toward increasing productivity by using larger vehicles with a human operator.

Solution Concept

There are 20 million TerramEarth vehicles in operation that collect 120 fields of data per second. Data is stored locally on the vehicle and can be accessed for analysis when a vehicle is serviced. The data is downloaded via a maintenance port. This same port can be used to adjust operational parameters, allowing the vehicles to be upgraded in the field with new computing modules.

Approximately 200,000 vehicles are connected to a cellular network, allowing TerramEarth to collect data directly. At a rate of 120 fields of data per second with 22 hours of operation per day, Terram Earth collects a total of about 9 TB/day from these connected vehicles.

Existing Technical Environment

TerramEarth's existing architecture is composed of Linux-based systems that reside in a data center.
These systems gzip CSV files from the field and upload via FTP, transform and aggregate them, and place the data in their data warehouse. Because this process takes time, aggregated reports are based on data that is 3 weeks old.

With this data, TerramEarth has been able to preemptively stock replacement parts and reduce unplanned downtime of their vehicles by 60%. However, because the data is stale, some customers are without their vehicles for up to 4 weeks while they wait for replacement parts.

Business Requirements

1. Decrease unplanned vehicle downtime to less than 1 week, without increasing the cost of carrying

surplus inventory
2. Support the dealer network with more data on how their customers use their equipment to better position new products and services
3. Have the ability to partner with different companies - especially with seed and fertilizer suppliers in the fast-growing agricultural business - to create compelling joint offerings for their customers.

CEO Statement

We have been successful in capitalizing on the trend toward larger vehicles to increase the productivity of our customers. Technological change is occurring rapidly, and TerramEarth has taken advantage of connected devices technology to provide our customers with better services, such as our intelligent farming equipment. With this technology, we have been able to increase farmers' yields by 25%, by using past trends to adjust how our vehicles operate. These advances have led to the rapid growth of our agricultural product line, which we expect will generate 50% of our revenues by 2020.

CTO Statement

Our competitive advantage has always been in the manufacturing process, with our ability to build better vehicles for lower cost than our competitors. However, new products with different approaches are constantly being developed, and I'm concerned that we lack the skills to undergo the next wave of transformations in our industry. Unfortunately, our CEO doesn't take technology obsolescence seriously and he considers the many new companies in our industry to be niche players. My goals are to build our skills while addressing immediate market needs through incremental innovations.